The night before, I’d dreamed about my old Zen teacher. He’d been dead for fifteen years, and suddenly he came back in full force, beautiful with his bald head. He would not look directly at me, still mad from what I had written about him in my last book.
Then, in the dream, Carol Reisen, my old college pal, called to tell me our English teacher Mr. Crane had just come back from the dead too. He was the most boring teacher I’d ever had.
The last night, Tom had a party for the group. I went along with Rob and Eddie. Tom came alive at that party. He and I did the Lindy Hop together. He twirled me around double time. After the first dance, he took off his sweatshirt and I peeled off my cardigan. We meant business. The Rolling Stones came on. We screamed the words for “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Eddie leaped up, howling and stomping. He’d made it through his five-comments-a-day requirement. Now everything he saw and felt could be expressed through his body.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Tom yelled and ran over to a trunk. He pulled out spike-heeled pink satin slippers trimmed with feathers, flung off his shoes and slipped them on. He danced, kicking up his legs. He bent down and pulled up his jeans to where they stopped below the knees. Eddie followed, showing his hairy legs and brown oxfords.
Tom’s boyfriend, Sage, changed the tape to Motown. Sweat poured off Tom’s forehead. We fell to the couch after that second cut.
The next morning I finally had time alone with Tom. We were face-to-face early Saturday across a small square table. He wore a white T-shirt with an unbuttoned white tailored long-sleeve shirt over it. A thick gray moustache, curly gray hair, and a big nose. He was handsome, compelling. He wanted three eggs over easy and a side of ham. The waitress told him they didn’t make over easy eggs here. He settled for scrambled.
What was it I wanted from Tom? He’d written his books; I’d written mine. We’d both been hippies. Almost sixty now, he told me that six years ago he’d broken up an eleven-year relationship, come down with full-blown AIDS, and lay alone in a hospital bed, where he almost died.
As a kid, close to open fields and distant mountains, isolated in a Mormon town right next to the Cheyenne/Shoshone reservation, he watched the unrelenting drinking of his family. “I’ve said that it was contracting HIV that saved me. I had to clean up my act, sleep at night, stop smoking. No more chugging beer. Otherwise, I would have gone the way of my people—stone-cold forever drunk—and soon dead.”
Tom looked at me as he talked, his hands on the edge of the table. At one point he took off his long-sleeved shirt, revealing lean, knotted arm muscles built over years of baling hay at the farm. His strength was limited now. The disease had eaten away at him.
Leaning forward, I suddenly blurted out, “Tom, how come you never showed in class?”
He looked down and then up at me. “Can I tell you the truth?”
I nodded.
“My longtime students and I were having a hard time. And the fact that you were coming—a well-known writer—made things even worse. We thought of this plan—my students would teach the class and I would give individual conferences. Then we wouldn’t have to teach together.”
Tom went back to his cabin to get one of my books for me to sign. As I waited for him, a newcomer joined a group of people at the next table. “How’s Ellen?” they greeted him.
“She’s walking with the Word.”
This is a friendly born-again place, I thought. I’m walking with the word too. I’ve filled notebooks with it.
Tom returned and handed me a book. I couldn’t think of anything to write. A pleasure to meet you came to mind. That’s all I can think of? I jotted down the platitude and signed my name.
We hugged good-bye in the street outside the café.
Eddie left early the next morning on the airport shuttle.
The following week, Rob and I wrote each day at the café across from our hotel. One morning at 7:00 he was right in front of me in line. He ordered coffee. The young girl behind the counter handed Rob a brown paper cup and he filled it with dark roast from a close-by thermos. I ordered a hot chocolate. This took longer. They steamed milk and ladled out cocoa. She asked my name to call it out when it was ready. I said, “Jane.”
Rob’s head swung around, but he took the leap and understood that a one-syllable name was easier than three. He nodded his head.
I went to a square table by the window, and he retreated to his by the wall. I immediately became absorbed, my hand moving fast. I had already filled three pages when the hot chocolate was shoved onto the table.
“It’s okay, Jane, to use an alias. Only remember it when they call it out—over and over.” Rob was standing above me, his hand on the cup.
“Oh, yeah, good idea.” We allowed ourselves one moment of laughter—then back to our notebooks.
Later I called out to him across the crowded café, “Give me another word for ‘response.’”
Hardly looking up from his page, he yelled out, “Retort, rebuttal, reply.” Rob was my very own Synonym Finder.
At noon I crossed the street. I’d put in four and a half hours. That was plenty. I thought of the phrase “the loneliness of the long-distance runner.”
I drove to Oswald West State Park and parked. I planned to hike up Neahkahnie, but it was not clear from the directions a friend had written down whether it was a two-and-a-half-mile trek till I got to the actual mountain, or if I was even in the right place to begin. But I didn’t worry too much because I saw a trail and my legs were hungry to move.
I entered the dark woods, the soft path piled with russet needles, old-growth spruce looming above. Ferns filled the ground; moss grew on rocks and hung from trees. The earth was not bare and dirt was not visible anywhere. So different from my home state.
I came to a swinging bridge over a fast stream and did not hesitate. I felt like Tarzan—no, like Jane. Remember: Jane. I moved fast.
Why hadn’t anyone told me about the Oregon coast? Easily as beautiful as Big Sur but so much less inhabited. No one was on the trail. After living at seven thousand feet for the last thirty years, sea level was a breeze for my robust lungs. Even a steep incline was easy.
The woods opened into a tangled trail rolling among abundant vines of near-ripe blackberries and pale raspberries. Over to the west was the Pacific, flat out between two cliffs. I was delighted in being half lost and half wandering.
I had written intensely all that morning, leaning over the notebook, deep in relation with my mind. A run to the bathroom was the only interruption to my concentration. This state of mind carried me out into the woods.
At first I turned my attention to the cool damp feeling of my skin, the sensation of my eyes adjusting to dark shadows, the blistering blue of the sky when I leaned my head far back to look beyond the stabbing spruce heights. Then, out of the corner of my right eye, almost like glimpsing a butterfly, something beckons. Once, twice, I let go.
I don’t know how to say this—I give way to no thought at all, none arising and none passing away, to no perception, no smell or feeling, not even sound. I disappear. Sure, I continue with one foot in front of the other, but no coagulation of attributes named Natalie exists. If someone walked by, the person would see this woman in black cotton pants, white sneakers, a black V-neck T-shirt with the arms of a red sweatshirt tied around her waist. But inside there is no one. The reign of myself simply stops existing, dropping away.
I go on up the mountain and I come down the mountain and I walk to the sea. When I sit on a bench, sound enters me again. I hear the crash of waves. Filled with a knowledge that I will not last forever, a great impersonal sadness rolls through me.
I don’t want to die. This is what I should have told Tom. But death will find me even if I don’t have AIDS. Then this single thought: Give everything while you can.
9
Rain and the Temple
When I studied with Katagiri Roshi in Minneapolis, I never thought of going to Japan. I had my own little Japan with him. But when he died,
I had a great desire to go. I wanted to see where he came from and the country that produced him—and that produced the Japanese Zen I was studying. I had a heart-to-heart connection with him, and that personal connection was really what carried me.
So I wanted to go to Japan, but I was scared. I had bought airplane tickets twice in the eight years since he died and then forfeited them.
But this time I decided I had to go. My partner, Michèle, agreed to come with me.
Right before we went, I visited Katagiri Roshi’s wife, Tomoe, in Minnesota. I asked her for exact directions to his old temple. When his teacher died, it had become his temple. No one since had been abbot there. When I studied with Roshi, he’d told stories about it all the time. Only he and his teacher practiced in this temple.
Tomoe gave me directions, and this is how precise she was: she not only told me where to get the bus after I took the train, but she opened up a photo album and showed me photos of the train station, the bus stop where I should get off, the spot where I should turn at the corner. And I thought, Oh, Tomoe, I can find it.
We arrive in Japan on a Thursday and go to Kyoto. The following Thursday morning I get up my courage to go out into the country. It is pouring rain. Pouring may be no big deal to someone who lives in San Francisco, but I live in New Mexico, where rain is an auspicious event. The rain in Kyoto scares me—it’s flooding the streets. I think, Should I go today? And then I think, Well, I planned to; okay, I’ll go. Michèle and I wear our green slickers. The Japanese only carry umbrellas, and they think it’s very American and cloddish to wear these big plastic things on public transportation, where you have to sit all wet next to someone else.
We travel first on the subway, climbing four deep flights down. We take the subway to the train station, where we will catch the train to a town called Tsuruga. It’s going to leave at 9:31, which in Japan means it leaves at exactly 9:31. This is really the only way we know that it’s the right train. It shows up at 9:31 and we jump on.
I ask people sitting in their seats with newspapers and box lunches of pickles, rice, sushi, and seaweed on their laps, “Tsuruga? Tsuruga?” “Hai.”Yes, we’re on the right train, and it is pouring hard and the clouds are dark gray.
The train ride is an hour and ten minutes. We get off in a little town. We go to the small tourist station, but they don’t speak a drop of English and I don’t speak a speck of Japanese. I have the name for the next destination. I say, “Kitada?” “Kitada,” they say, nodding. I want to ask, “Bus Two? Three? Where?” I hold up fingers. They point to two. It’s bus two, leaving at 12:25. They write down “Kitada” in kanji on a slip of paper for us, so we can match it with the sign on the front of the bus.
We find the bus, but it’s only 11:25. We have an hour to walk around.
Usually in the United States I don’t eat lunch at the Greyhound bus station. But when I’m in other countries, I’m suddenly wide open, and we’re hungry. We go into a tiny—I mean one small table width—restaurant. The waiter stands by us, pen poised to take our order. We point to something on the menu—not knowing what it is. The waiter speaks quickly with hands jerking and we nod and say, “Hai! Hai!” He shakes his head and goes into the back room.
A few other people are being served noodles, vegetables, and pieces of white fish. We aren’t served, and the time goes by. I whisper to Michèle, “I think he was trying to tell us something important and we didn’t get it.” We have fifteen minutes until the bus leaves.
I screw up my courage, run into the kitchen, point to my watch, and hold up my hand. I flash five fingers three times—fifteen minutes till the bus leaves—but what my motions mean to the cook I have no idea.
I go back to my seat, and Michèle says, “So it’s going to come?” I say, “Oh, yeah; he understood.”
Ten minutes before the bus leaves, the waiter places an omelet before us. We’re thrilled it isn’t octopus. We eat it up quickly and run to the bus. I ask the bus driver: “Kitada?” He nods. “Kitada.” Again I say “Kitada?” “Kitada.”
We sit down, hoping someone will motion when we reach Kitada or that I’ll recognize the bus stop from Tomoe’s photo in the album.
People on the bus are staring at us—we are giants in green slickers with no umbrellas. And it is still pouring out, the kind of rain that hits and bounces.
The bus moves through the wet countryside, and the road becomes narrow. People in the bus continue to gawk at us. Several times I run up to the bus driver and ask, “Kitada?” He nods. Finally everyone on the bus knows, so when we get there they yell in unison, “Kitada!”
We stumble out into the rain. The bus takes off, and we’re left on the edge of the road next to a Japanese version of a 7-Eleven and a car repair shop.
Then we see a road. We begin walking down it. As soon as the road curves, we’re in the Japanese countryside of rice fields, reeds, and ponds. In the distance we can see a village. No shops or bakeries, just little houses and farmed fields. It’s beautiful through the slate-gray rain.
A heavy, powerful bird swoops down in front of us—feathered something like an owl but the royal size of an eagle. I say to Michèle, “What kind of bird is that?” It’s the only bird out because it’s raining so hard.
We trudge into the little town, where all shutters on houses are closed. The intricate flower pots drip with rain. Over a hill I see the Sea of Japan. I remembered Tomoe saying there was a sea. And so we keep going, and finally there is a marker in kanji.
I take a chance. “This is it,” I say, hoping I recall it from one of Tomoe’s photos. Behind it we see a mud path—the old entryway, Tomoe told me. We both hesitate. Michèle says, “Let’s follow it,” and we step off the pavement. The earth is soggy, and we squish with each footstep.
In the distance I see a red-tiled roof—I know it is Taizoin Temple. There’s one person in a paddy field in the rain, working with a hoe. He sees us walk by, and he turns. I wave, and he nods. Other big white people have come over time to visit Roshi’s ashes.
The temple is deserted; there’s no one to practice here anymore, since Roshi left for America more than thirty years earlier. The little village takes care of it. They open it for burials.
I see a little cemetery and say to Michèle, “Can I go by myself? I’ll meet you.”
It is an ancient cemetery with stone buddhas, tombstones, and decorative rocks. It is wonderful.
Then I panic. What if I don’t find his tombstone? I walk around lots of old stones. Then, in the distance, I see a clutter of rounded tops. I know the rounded part signifies the marker of the teacher lineage for that temple.
I hurry over. At the very end is a newer tombstone. I know it is Roshi’s. It is still pouring, but I push off my hood and throw off my slicker. I prostrate myself three times on the wet earth and then kneel in front of his stone. Pushing the dripping hair from my face, rain running down my cheeks, I speak to my old teacher. “I’m here. It took me a while, but I made it.” I cannot say how good I feel to finally be there near some of his ashes.
I look around. Two rhododendron, a few trees I cannot name, but I can see them even now—dark green, tall, with drooping needles—a camellia bush, rice paddies, the Japan Sea, and the village. For years Roshi told me about this place. It was just him and his teacher practicing together. As a young monk, he thought that it was silly to get up in the morning. But his teacher kept a schedule, got up at five, sat zazen, made breakfast, and then he’d go and shake Katagiri. “C’mon, it’s time to eat.” And Katagiri would say, “Oh, I’ll just sleep late.” And his teacher would say, “It’s good to follow the schedule, even if no one else is here.”
Every few days they’d walk into town to formally ask the villagers for food with their begging bowls. And every time it was just the two of them, the teacher in front and the student behind.
When the student decided to come to America, he told his teacher. His teacher didn’t discourage him, but Roshi told us, “When we walked into town, I could te
ll from his back that he felt lonely.”
I remember the two of them as I sit in the rain in the cemetery. I make a vow to him, and I pick up a single black stone and put it in my pocket.
I go over to the temple. I was told it was locked, but Michèle finds a way to unlock it. We take our shoes off and go in.
It is a really old temple with a brick oven for a stove. We slide open paper walls, discovering spaces with tatamis on the floor.
The final place we find is a formal meditation hall with a large altar and a faded picture across the room. It must be Katagiri’s teacher. A little photo is tucked into the bottom of the frame, very faded. I step closer. I can make out Roshi’s profile. He must have sent it from America.
I stand in front of it a long time, as the rain thunders down on the roof.
When we leave, walking down the road, facing the Japan Sea, I know this is the path he took into the village.
Suddenly that brown bird swoops down in front of me and flies right back to the eaves of the temple. I follow him with my eyes and turn. I watch him open and close his wings as he clutches the edge of the roof with his claws. I swallow, lift my hand, wave good-bye, and keep walking.
Zigzagging
Zen is just zen
You can’t ask sugar to give you protein
or a refrigerator to be a dog
Everything has its place
In a split second
my teacher died and
and I was left standing
10
Dog-Bite Enlightenment
There is a Zen story about an old monk who became disgusted after practicing for more than forty years in a monastery—I’m getting nowhere, he thought—and decided to leave. As he walked down the path to the gate, with his few belongings on his back, he noticed that the walkway looked a bit messy. He picked up a rake to smooth it out. As he raked the dirt, one pebble flew out, hit some standing bamboo nearby, and made a sharp thwack. The instant the monk heard that sound, he became enlightened.
The Great Spring Page 8
